


The Injurious Inception

by redibis



Series: A Series of Irrational Events [1]
Category: Lemony Snicket - Fandom, Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Arson, Gen, Multi, Other, Sibling Love, Treacherous Arson, Treachery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 07:38:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1078310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redibis/pseuds/redibis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>--On Hiatus--</p>
<p>LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA VOI CH'ENTRATE</p>
<p>These words were carved into a very important gate by a very important person many, many years ago, but neither their age nor the medium upon which they were inscribed, a word which here means 'written', makes them any less wise. This volume in the series of irrational events that seem to plague the Baudelaire children includes a man, another man, a terrible fire, another terrible fire, a third slightly less terrible fire, egg drop soup, an illegal wedding, and lightning, not necessarily in that order. It would be quite wise indeed to abandon hope now, dear reader, and indeed abandon hope of ever having hope again.</p>
<p>With all due respect,</p>
<p>K</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

_To Beatrice:_

_The most beautiful lilies are far too often picked long before they ought to be._

* * *

 

It was quite out of the ordinary that the three children were at Briny Beach. Going to the beach is, of course, not an uncommon occurrence, when the weather permits. What was so atypical about these three children standing on the beach on this particular day was that the weather absolutely did  _not_  permit. Gray clouds hung from the sky like light fixtures doing a very poor job of being light fixtures, not only because they were blocking light rather than emitting it but also because light fixtures generally do not shed drops of water, and if they do, one should generally consult with one's electrician and demand either a refund or an umbrella suitable for indoor use.

It should go without saying that the children themselves were also out of the ordinary.

Violet Baudelaire was not like many other girls her age for a variety of reasons. Klaus Baudelaire, also occasionally known as Klara, was not like other children of any age for a similar variety of reasons and some different ones. And Sunny Baudelaire was so unlike any baby I have ever made the acquaintance of that I could likely fill many books writing about the youngest Baudelaire alone.

Violet was an inventor, which is an uncommon but enriching occupation for a fourteen-year-old. She enjoyed problem solving, a habit which had been encouraged in her for as long as she could remember and possibly before she could remember. Violet approached every problem in her path with calm rationality. She was not afraid to consider every possibility, even the ones she did not like.

At the moment this tragic and unlikely story commences, Violet was experimenting with electricity, which is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very dangerous for anyone except qualified professionals who have undergone a great deal of training and know the difference between chandeliers and cumulonimbus clouds. Violet was not an electrician, but she knew a great deal about the difference between voltage and wattage, statistics on lightning-related fatalities, conductivity, and salt water.

Violet's curly black hair was tied back with a dark purple ribbon her mother had given her as a twelfth birthday gift. Of course it was a silly thought, but Violet seemed to actually  _think better_  when her hair was not in her eyes. There was no real way to test this feeling empirically, because there were simply too many variables that may have been influencing the way Violet was thinking, and her hair ribbon was just one of them. For all the Baudelaire ingenuity, some things could simply not be tested. Violet was willing to let it slide just this once, because she liked the ribbon regardless of whether it enhanced her brainpower. Violet's mother was also an inventor, a fact which I often think about when I am presumably alone on the roof of my astronomer friend's conservatory. It is easy to dismiss some things that cannot be tested, like the effectiveness of hair ribbons on cognitive functions, but very, very difficult and painful to dismiss others, like the effects of a single article of a tea set on the emotional state of a disagreeable group of people.

I will not reproduce the exact nature of Violet's electrical experiments here because my editor would likely drop to their knees, sobbing and begging me to cease printing this litany of misfortune and irrational happenstances before anyone else was hurt, which would be very sensible of them by any standards. In fact, you, my dear reader, should  _stop reading immediately_  and imagine the eldest Baudelaire child coming to a scientifically sound and personally pleasing conclusion in her experiments and leading her siblings home from their rainy-day picnic at the beach, instead of learning of the true and frustrating events to follow.

While Violet was conducting very, very, very, very, [...] very dangerous experiments, her brother Klaus (or perhaps her sister Klara; Violet had been in too much of a hurry to get to the beach before it started to rain and had forgotten to ask, which was something she usually made sure to do) was making the acquaintance of several tide pool creatures. Klaus (he was Klaus and not Klara at the moment) loved to read and had recently done rather a lot of reading about the various invertebrate that lived in Briny Beach, but he was also of the opinion that there was nothing about a contemporary that could be read that couldn't also be personally verified and improved upon.

If it was not completely obvious, Klaus had also done great deal of reading about pretty much everything other conceivable subject, from gender studies to a variety of Zulu traditional dances, and from the production of apple butter to the history of legumes in North America. Some people would and often did argue that very many of the subjects Klaus read about were inappropriate for a twelve-year-old boy, and Klaus would respond that he was not  _always_  a twelve-year-old boy, sometimes she was a twelve-year-old girl, which usually shut people up long enough for Klaus (or Klara) to finish his (or her) book. Sometimes Klaus also liked to conceive of himself as a being entirely free of societal notions of gender, but that usually went right over people's heads.

Klaus would much rather have been home in his parents' astoundingly large library in one of the similarly large and comfortable chairs studying things like clownfish and parthenogenetic lizards, but he would have to make due with the local fauna. The tide pool he was currently examining was home to several bivalves, at least one sea urchin, and one spiky thing that  _might_  have been a sea urchin but might also have been a waterlogged chestnut, and those creatures and tree nuts were quite interesting in their own right.

Sunny Baudelaire was sitting on a picnic blanket to avoid getting sandy, biting a piece of petrified driftwood. Sunny was not very old and did not have interests quite as specialized as the other two Baudelaires. What Sunny did have was a set of teeth that would have sent almost any dentist on Earth running for their security blanket, except perhaps for my acquaintance Dr. Charles, who, according to my limited research on dentists, would likely have smiled knowingly and handed Sunny a solid brass teething ring. Because Sunny was still only a baby, no one was really sure exactly what Sunny would grow up to become, so for convenience's sake usually referred to the child as though Sunny were female. She was too young to really understand the concept of pronouns but did not seem to be overly distressed by this.

Unbeknownst to all three Baudelaire children, as they passed the dreary day picnicking, inventing, researching, and biting things on Briny Beach, something dreadful had happened elsewhere. Many awful things happen every day, and most people go about their business perfectly unaware of all the terrible things that are happening in the world, which is usually sensible because there are many things that one person cannot immediately change by their own power.

I must pause to tell you that good and evil are not really universally objective, a phrase which here means 'are mostly a muddy gray color instead of the sharply divided black and white most people think they are'. Many very intelligent people have bickered for a number of years and have come to several displeasing conclusions about something called the human condition, which, although it sounds like something you may come down with if you stay out in the rain too long or ingest something past its expiration date, is really not all that bad after all.

There are, of course, noble people and ignoble people. There are people who adore cocktail peanuts and people who do not care much for them and even people who are allergic to them and would very much prefer to avoid them for their own safety. There are people who make good decisions and people who make bad decisions. There are women who steal precious tableware and women who cannot understand  _why_  some women decide to steal precious tableware, even after so many years of sleepless nights.

I have a great many upstanding and moral witnesses who can attest that he dreadful thing that happened at the Baudelaires' home was the sad and unnecessary result of true evil, and an equal number of likewise credible witnesses who argue that what happened was certainly necessary and perhaps even  _good_. These two groups of people may well argue on the subject until the Sun begins to expand and finds itself unable one morning to fuse hydrogen into helium and says to itself, "I'm afraid it's time for me to leave," just as I said to Beatrice on that night so many years ago, although I must make it perfectly clear that I was  _not_  fusing hydrogen into helium at the time, contrary to some reports about the evening.

Dear reader, no one is really sure whether or not there are good people and evil people. I hope you will pause to consider the facts it is my sworn duty to report to you and I hope you will draw conclusions where lack of information and a poisoned library card have forced me to leave these pages blank. I will leave it to you, should you make the unwise choice to keep reading this first miserable volume of the Baudelaires' story, to decide whether or not the Baudelaire fire, like so many other fires, was put into motion for the greater good or merely one person's mistaken definition of good. 


	2. Chapter Two

Violet heard someone's footsteps on the sand. She could tell that someone was approaching not because the person was a particularly heavy walker, but because Briny Beach was somewhat famous for its 'barking sand', which did not actually bark but merely contained sand particles of a certain shape that caused them to emit a sound when enough of them were rubbed together quickly enough and with enough friction.

Violet squinted through the fog that was settling on the beach. "Klara?" she called, trying to attract her sibling's attention.

"Klaus, actually," Klaus responded. "What is it?"

"I apologize for not asking you earlier," Violet said. "I was in a hurry. Listen, do you hear the sand barking?"

Klaus listened hard for a moment. The sound was very faint, so it was probably far away. "Yes," he said. "Do you think it's someone walking on the beach?"

"Who would come to Briny Beach on a day like this?" Violet asked, then paused for a moment. "Besides us, of course," she said.

"Agwah?" Sunny asked. Because she was a baby, she was still getting the hang of speaking in a way that most people could understand. Fortunately, her siblings had spent a great deal of time around her and could reasonably conclude that she meant to say something like, "Pardon me, but who is that mysterious person approaching us through the fog?"

Violet's fingers tightened around the lightning rod she was holding. If the person turned out to be dangerous, she could defend herself with it. If the person turned out not to be dangerous, then there was no need to worry. Erring on the side of caution, a phrase which here means 'brandishing a lightning rod like a weapon even if you are unsure whether or not you will actually need to use it as one', is rarely a bad idea.

Sunny's inquiry was met by the sound of someone coughing into a handkerchief as the mysterious person approaching the Baudelaires through the fog drew nearer. Violet relaxed her grip on her lightning rod. She recognized the cough, and as the mysterious person came close enough for all three Baudelaires to see, she recognized the person whom the cough belonged to as well.

"Mr. Poe," Klaus said. "Why have you come to Briny Beach on a day like this?"

"Normally," Mr. Poe said, "one begins a conversation with 'How do you do?' but in your case, I will make an exception. I've come to deliver some news."

Klaus smiled to himself. He was the subject of lots of exceptions. So far, the list tallied twenty-three and a half.

"Has something bad happened, Mr. Poe?" asked Violet, whose brain was working rapidly on a hypothesis as to why Mr. Poe might have come to Briny Beach on such a dreary day.

"I'm afraid something awful has happened, Viktor," Mr. Poe said. "It concerns your parents."

"It's Violet." Violet normally disliked correcting people, which her parents had warned her usually only made intelligent people like herself seem like they were trying to boast about their intelligence. Violet knew she was intelligent, but she didn't see why that meant she had to avoid correcting people about certain subjects. _Especially_  certain subjects they had been reminded countless times about.

"Violet. Of course." Mr. Poe looked like he was about to say something else, but he was struck by another fit of coughing and had to excuse himself for a moment until it passed. "The reason I have come to Briny Beach today," he finally managed to say, "is that your parents have been in a terrible accent."

Klaus' smile crumbled. It did not *literally* crumble, of course, like the enigmatic smile on an ancient statue might crumble when exposed to acid rain and enemy cannon fire. But Klaus' smile crumbled _figuratively_  as the meaning of Mr. Poe's words sunk in, almost as though they were made of acid rain themselves.

Klaus did not waste time suggesting that Mr. Poe must have been playing a terribly mean-spirited joke on the three Baudelaires. He knew Mr. Poe was something of a workaholic and thus would not have left his large, mahogany desk at Mulctuary Money Management for anything less serious than a large swarm of locusts or perhaps a house fire. Klaus did not see any large, flying insects, and I can confirm that there was not, in fact, a Biblical plague taking place at Briny Beach that day. The water was purportedly briefly changed to blood for a period of roughly ten minutes several years ago, but I have not been able to find a reputable source for this bit of information and have been forced to conclude that it is probably untrue.

"Was the fire set on purpose?" Klaus asked, his voice shaking only a little. "Or was it an accident?"

Violet looked at her sibling. "Klaus," she said admonishingly, a word which here means 'with a hint of embarrassment and dread that her sibling could suggest such a terrible thing'. But as she ran through the same thought process that Klaus had undoubtedly just run through himself, she discovered *why* he had suggested such a terrible thing. It made a sickening kind of sense. She almost wanted to laugh, but not at all because it was funny. Sometimes when things are so horrible that you do not want to believe them no matter how strongly the evidence insists that you must, the only thing to do is laugh at how unfair the universe seems.

Violet did not laugh. Instead, she turned to Klaus. "It must be arson," she said. "Otherwise I don't think Mr. Poe would have said it was an accident."

Mr. Poe regarded them both as though they were mind-readers. The older Baudelaire siblings often had this effect on people.

"No one is quite sure yet," Mr. Poe said, visibly unnerved, "whether or not the fire was started intentionally, and _do_  please remind me someday to ask how on _Earth_  you children _do_ that."

"Naka?" Sunny asked, from her spot on the picnic blanket. She was too young to really understand what was going on, but she *did* think it was odd that Mr. Poe should come to the beach on such a gray day, and what she was asking probably meant something like, "Why has Mr. Poe come to the beach?"

Violet picked Sunny up and held her. "I'm afraid something very bad has happened, Sunny," Violet said. "Mom and Dad have gone away for a very long time, and--"

"There's no use telling Sunny *that*," Klaus said, kicking a rock into the grayish surf. He was not taking the news well, though it is not really reasonable to expect someone to take the news of the death of someone very close to them well.

Violet would have liked to tell Klaus that there was  _absolutely_  use in protecting young children from the harsh truths of the world until they were sufficiently psychologically advanced to comprehend them. Which she did, but using different words words. "You know very well there's no use getting _angry_ ," Violet said calmly. "Unless you've devised a method of faster-than-light travel so we can go back in time and _prevent_  the fire from happening? Or perhaps you think Mr. Poe is making it all up and there _was_ no fire and Mom and Dad will step out of the fog any moment and take us all out for  _ice cream_ , Klaus, is that what you think?"

"You're right," Klaus muttered. "I'm sorry. Though I have been reading a great deal of Welles lately."

"I'm sorry, too," Violet said. She hadn't intended for her words to come out quite so angrily. "I guess we're all a little confused and upset."

"Children," Mr. Poe said. He was feeling really rather out of sorts, listening to the two Baudelaires bickering about advanced scientific things when they should have been weeping like normal children would have done. It was time to put a stop to this and take control of the situation like an adult. "I'm afraid you must gather up your things and come with me."

"Dokou?" Sunny asked, which meant, "Where are you taking us?"

"Where are you taking us?" Violet repeated in English, for her youngest sibling's benefit. Mr. Poe, like most people, had not understood Sunny's question.

"The authorities warned me," Mr. Poe said, "that you would have to be brought back to the... the scene of the incident. I protested, of course, but--"

"Will the police have collected our parents' bodies by now?" Klaus asked quietly.

"Klaus," Mr. Poe said admonishingly, a word which here means 'in a manner that sounded shocked and slightly disgusted that a young boy had asked such a gruesome question'. "I'm shocked that you would ask such a gruesome question."

Violet shot her sibling a look that told him wordlessly not to ask questions in such a way that their only source of information would be too offended to answer. Klaus shrugged in response in a way that meant he hadn't  _meant_ to unnerve Mr. Poe, and he would appreciate it very much if Violet could take over the converstaion for a moment so he could think about what to do next.

Violet was glad to oblige. "What Klaus _means_  to ask is whether or not we'll, ah, have to identify our parents for the benefit of the police."

"I'm afraid," Mr. Poe said carefully, "that your parents perished very quickly in the fire." He coughed a few times into his handkerchief. "And I am told," he went on, "that your mother's golden locket was discovered."

"Will we be able to keep anything that isn't damaged?" Violet asked.

"I am afraid," Mr. Poe said, "that the state in which your mother's locket was discovered precludes you from recovering it. 'Preclude' is a complicated word which means--"

"Preclude is a synonym for prevent," Klaus said quickly. It is generally considered quite rude to interrupt someone multiple times over the course of one conversation. Klaus often missed social nuances, especially when his brain was working faster than his mouth. Thinking quickly is not an excuse for rude behavior, and Klaus made a mental note to apologize to Mr. Poe for interrupting him so much, but he felt it could be excused for the moment, given the circumstances. "It was melted, wasn't it? Her necklace."

Mr. Poe merely shifted his feet slightly in the sand, which might as well have been a clear 'yes'.

Armed with the fact that Mr. Poe had just conceded, Klaus wandered through the shelves of his mental library until he found the book he was looking for, which contained facts about historical fires. He selected another book, which contained facts about crime scene investigation. And he selected a final book about metallurgy, the science of forging molten metal into objects that could be used once the hot liquid metal was cool.

"The melting point of gold is nearly two thousand degrees Fahrenheit," Klaus said gravely, which made sense to everyone present who was not a banker or an infant.

Violet was very familiar with her sibling's eidetic memory, a phrase which here means 'ability to recall things he had read with incredible accuracy', and knew precisely what Klaus meant. He had inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, gotten his first question answered; if not even solid metal could have made it through the fire, then it was certain that there was no hope of seeing their parents again in any form except cinders.

"Ah, yes," Mr. Poe said, feeling quite helpless. He was supposed to be taking care of the children, but given what he knew about them, he had no doubts that they could likely take very good care of themselves without his help, thank you very much. But he did have to keep up appearances.

Appearances, like faked accents and circus tents, are not always good things to keep up, especially when a Parisian woman is threatening to expose you as a spy when in fact you were just looking for the washroom or a human cannonball has been replaced with actual cannonballs, unbeknownst to the audience. But Mr. Poe stood very staunchly by the idea that adults should be in charge and children should listen to them, which usually made sense but just as often did not. There are a great deal of intelligent children in the world, and a great deal of adults who are unfit to look after them for many reasons. Mr. Poe unfortunately had never really belonged to the first category but was moving swiftly along in the second.

"Let's get moving, then," Mr. Poe said, glancing at a watch no one had seen him take out of his coat pocket. "My car is parked down by the jetty, which is a bit of a walk. A jetty is a mass of stones that serves to break the surf," he added.

"We know what a jetty is," said Klaus, who had known since he was five that jetties are man-made structures that serve to guide boats into harbors and prevent longshore drift, not to break the surf, and what Mr. Poe was actually thinking of was called a breakwater.

Violet placed a hand on her sibling's shoulder to reassure him that _she_ had heard him and _she_ knew what a jetty was intended to do. Klaus smiled despite the horrible news he had just been given. Violet and Klaus quickly packed up the remains of their picnic. Klaus carried the picnic basket and Violet carried Sunny and the two elder Baudelaires walked solemnly behind Mr. Poe, thinking very hard about what they ought to do now.

Even in the midst of the worst weather, such as the weather on Briny Beach on that awful day, it is important to remember that some people are very concerned with ships returning safely to their jetties, and that lighthouses are generally agreed to be an excellent way to prevent shipwrecks. Though this nautical knowledge may come in handy to you in the literal sense one day, I urge you to think about it from a metaphorical standpoint as well. I also urge you to cease reading this tale immediately if you know what is good for you, and even if you do not know what is good for you, you should stop reading anyway.

Please spare yourself from the terror to come, and as you leave, know this, dear reader: no matter how dark things may seem, no matter the melting point of gold or the buoyancy of a small glass dish, there is always some light to guide, there is always some metal which melts at a much higher temperature than gold, and there has _got_  to be some way to rescue a glass dish from a cave deep under the ocean.

The Baudelaires knew a storm was coming, and that it was not only the storm approaching Briny Beach. They knew that something was just on the brink of happening, and whether it turned out for better or for worse, or indeed if things took a different route and simply turned out, they would have to be each other's lighthouses.


End file.
